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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 666 posts.
The DMCA online safe harbor is a notice-and-takedown scheme. Web hosts aren’t liable for copyright-infringing third-party uploads unless and until the copyright owner submits a proper takedown notice to the host, at which point the web host can remain legally...
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
I replaced my ChatGPT personalization settings with this prompt a few weeks ago and promptly forgot about it: Be extraordinarily skeptical of your own…
Being "the enshittification guy" means that people expect you to weigh in on every service or platform that has been deliberately worsened to turn a buck. It's an impossible task (and a boring one besides). There's too much of this shit, and it's all so mid – a real "banality of enshittification" situation.
Miss the obvious, lose your republic
It’s election season here in Iceland! The election is on Saturday, 30th of November, so next Saturday from when this is written. Every time elections are upcoming, somebody inevitably asks me how the voting system here works, probably expecting a simple answer. So, here’s a stab at it. Iceland uses a biproportional…
Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles.
Overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a money problem. Lessons about desire from "Spirited Away".
In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 ... Read more
We cannot create a better world if we cannot imagine it.
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
At Revision 2025, we released "Signal Carnival" ( csdb , YouTube ). This demo asks you to switch the audio and video cable of your C64:
From The world is entering an era where identity is no longer a matter of personal relationships, lived experience, or even paperwork. Increasingly, it is reduced to biometric scans, algorithmic ve…
LLMs suck at comedy, art, journalism, research, and science for the same fundamental reason
Personal writing by Walid Dib, and a collection of games, apps, and companies I’ve built.
Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer asks “When did jerk stop meaning ‘stupid’?” He starts with the Steve Martin movie The Jerk , saying of its protagonist:
Silver Bulletin will begin publishing some new features soon — including Trump approval ratings. But the media just lost an extremely valuable resource.
Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.
A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image used on my twitter archive. I gave in and paid it, but what does that mean for open graph images and copyright?
Benjamin Button Reviews macOS | exotext
An in-depth look at the currently trending Arch Linux configuration that is Omarchy.
A Caesar cipher is a reasonable transformation for a transformer to learn in its weights, given that a specific cipher offset occurs often enough in its training data. There will be some hidden representation of the input tokens' spelling, and this representation could be used to shift letters onto other letters in…
Thomas Ptacek, a friend and expert witness in this lawsuit summed it up best in the court's hallway while walking within three feet of opposing counsel: "This is fucking stupid" .
At this summer's HOPE conference, Joshua Aaron spoke about ICEBlock, his iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5 mile radius, and to get notifications when others report ICE sightings near them. You can see the full talk, and the lively/infuriating Q&A,
It all started with a sarcastic jab in a chat: “You shouldn’t be more Catholic than the Pope. You go to order a coffee, and the guy’s like, ‘From Kenyan farms or Brazil?’ It’s l...
This is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk by Devine on November 26th 2022. Watch the video version on (YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie .
The largely overlooked privacy risks of using AI apps that not only remember your conversations, but are capable of using these to reveal your deepest secrets to others
I rented a car from Turo this weekend and it might as well have exploded...
Houston and Dallas reduced street homelessness dramatically not by being more compassionate or cruel than California, but by building working systems
